A new European Air Traffic Management

Let's do it - for Europe's Aviation

The advances in Artificial Intelligence are for sure the biggest game changer to global businesses as well as to our personal life. Machine learning and Natural Language Processing technologies celebrate enormous advances and have already conquered our life – even if we do not realise it at the first glance.

With AI, standard jobs and even whole professions will change or even disappear – e.g. the chauffeur of a car, and not to talk about lawyers and medical doctors.

Ok, we need to stop here, but those who are deeply engaged in aviation for many years now know that the flight of an airplane can be automated to a great extend – even without AI. We knew that more than 25 years ago. Bright concepts like ADS-B and ASAS were discussed – when? Around 2000!

And European airspace had drastic capacity issues at these times. Then came the fuel crisis with extraordinary high fuel prices. The aviation industry has all survived this – but with a lot of sacrifices. Many airlines of the past do not exist today anymore. The same with some aircraft and equipment manufacturers.

It would be fantastic if we human beings could for once take the lessons learned of the past and realize with full passion and cooperation the projects and concepts which were already elaborated in the first phase of SESAR – the Definition Phase – and published in 2008 – 11 years ago. Everything is in DeliverableV of this work – the first Master Plan.

And where are we today with this?

How long do we want to continue with changing as little as possible and use public money for a bundle of processes and activities not even having achieved the basic goal till today: full ground system interoperability?

OK, let us see all this as the necessary evolution but let us also no longer stick to words like: it is all that complex…..

Let’s move forward to create and shape the new European Air Traffic Management system. Let’s do it – It is more than overdue! And finally: what about the application of AI in ATM? This is a great supporting tool for even much better service provision. We are at the early steps of a long way.